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Does Apple looks through computers' hard drives that are in for repair?

mrat93

mrat93

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Dec 30, 2006
2,354
3,421
Sorry if this isn't the right forum...

My imac's hard drive is dead, and I am bringing it into Apple today. I have personal information that's not very hard to find. Has Apple been known to snoop around other peoples' computers while being in for repair? It sounds like the hard drive is most likely dead, so should I be worried at all? Thanks.
 
I seriously doubt Apple employees have the time to dig through your data. Besides, what's important to you is likely quite boring to them.
 
When you say Apple, what you mean is "any one of the tens of thousands of people that Apple employs/contracts at its retail and service locations".

From my experience, I'd say that almost all of them are decent people and won't go doing that. And to GGJstudio's point, you're probably not all that interesting to a repair person, the repair folks are generally busy and won't have time to go in depth-snooping, and if your repair gets done at a store, there's very little time where a Genius is alone (which seems to me would make it harder to snoop, when the Genius Room in the back of house is full with other Geniuses doing repairs).

But Apple doesn't have some magical ability to only hire perfect people, so yes, there's always a very small chance that your iMac will be repaired by some weirdo that will look through your files.
 
GGJstudios said:
I seriously doubt Apple employees have the time to dig through your data. Besides, what's important to you is likely quite boring to them.
Click to expand...

Plus the HD is dead, meaning that the employee would have to use data recovery software, transfer the platters to another disk or something similar which takes effort and isn't free nor easy.
 
Thanks everybody! Sorry, I just get paranoid about these things. One more question... If I pay extra, could Apple also give me a hard drive upgrade?
 
mrat93 said:
Thanks everybody! Sorry, I just get paranoid about these things. One more question... If I pay extra, could Apple also give me a hard drive upgrade?
Click to expand...
Yes and no. I've seen them install, for a fee, a new drive that the customer purchased elsewhere, but that was for an iMac that was out of warranty (so there would have been a fee to fix it, regardless).

But in regards to them selling you a newer, bigger drive that they provide, I've never seen that.
 
I had a PC whose HDD went bad. I took it to a repair guy in the phone book, but he could not recover the data, so he did not charge me. Then I tried BinaryBiz and I could see the data on the drive and pick which folders to recover.
 
Not to scare you, but I have read on here before about Apple Store staff using the iTunes Store accounts of people whose computers were in for repair (that had one-click purchasing enabled, obviously).
 
I used to work at a computer store and let me say, regardless of the work load, people are curious and even apple workers may take a peek at what's on the HD.

Personally, while I have nothing of interest on my hard drive, I wipe it before sending it into apple
 
This kind of thing makes me sad, in a weird, and possibly stupid kind of way. The average customer puts a massive amount of trust in a computer store, much like a mechanic or builder, and doing stuff like that is, in my opinion, horrible.
 
Ivan P said:
Not to scare you, but I have read on here before about Apple Store staff using the iTunes Store accounts of people whose computers were in for repair (that had one-click purchasing enabled, obviously).
Click to expand...

Could you post a link to that, and maybe post it to Apple as well, because I suspect they would want to know about it and then it would be Apple Store ex-staff that did that.
 
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